“Some of these stories are closer to my own life than others are, but not one of them is as close as people seem to think.” Alice Murno, from the intro to Moons of Jupiter

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see." Arthur Schopenhauer

“Why does everything you know, and everything you’ve learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too. Show me where it says, in the Bible, ‘Purgatory.’ Show me where it says ‘relics, monks, nuns.’ Show me where it says ‘Pope.’” –Thomas Cromwell imagines asking Thomas More—Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Friday, June 19, 2015

The Issue with Jurassic World No One Has the Balls to Talk about

We all know who the real
stars of Jurassic World are—actress Bryce
Dallas Howard’s deftness at running from myriad dinos over diverse terrains in
posh heels (without messing up her ruler-straight hair), and actor Chris Pratt’s
ability to find a miraculously smooth path for his motorcycle as he speeds
through the tangled jungle alongside the raptors he’s trained as bloodhounds. So
maybe the mosasaur was a bit too
big, and maybe the denouement’s interspecies melee was a little too
reminiscent of Godzilla vs Mothra vs Ghidorah, and of course the dinos were
altogether too
featherless. But these are quibbles. The movie is supposed to be fun. And
it works. There is, however, one serious issue with the movie no one has the
courage or moral clarity to discuss (except me of course).

First a confession: until
seeing Jurassic World, I hated
hipsters as much as any red-blooded American male who came of age in the 90s. The
ironically overgrown or overly manicured facial hair, the freakishly tight
pants, the conspicuously conspicuous three-pounds of corrective eyewear, the
fan boy nostalgia for the most annoying pop culture era in history, the contra-scientific
certainty that vinyl sounds better, the bitter beer, the way talking to them
makes you feel like you’re being interviewed by a dimwitted stand-in for
Stephen Colbert on the Colbert Report.
It’s all just awful. But as I was watching Jake Johnson’s nerdy character in
the movie being ruthlessly juxtaposed with the ultra-masculine Chris Pratt, my
repulsion began to give way to pity.

Maybe it was because earlier
in the day I’d read about some poor bastard who’d written a
letter seeking advice from the hosts of a literary blog. The letter writer,
who fashioned himself a poet, had been all but talked out of ever writing
poetry again. Here’s how he describes his crisis:

I am a
white, male poet—a white, male poet who is aware of his privilege and sensitive
to inequalities facing women, POC, and LGBTQ individuals, but despite this
awareness and sensitivity, I am still white and still male. Sometimes I feel
like the time to write from my experience has passed, that the need for poems
from a white, male perspective just isn’t there anymore.

You can picture this guilt-ridden sad sack scrunching his
face and balling his fists in an attempt to will himself out of existence. But
much to his consternation, no matter how hard he tries to erase the reality, there
he is, white and male as ever. He goes on:

Sometimes
I write from other perspectives via persona poems in order to understand and
empathize with the so-called “other”; but I fear that this could be construed
as yet another example of my privilege—that I am appropriating another person’s
experience. Write what you know and risk denying voices whose stories are more
urgent; write to learn what you don’t know and risk colonizing someone else’s
story.

What a little bitch, right? On the one hand, he’s
paralyzed with the fear of being seen as someone who exercises his supposed
privilege; on the other, he’s egocentric enough to think any of those scare-quoted
others give a shit about his poetry. “I feel terrible about feeling terrible
about this,” he whines, “since I also know that for so long, white men made
other people feel terrible about who they were.” I mean, modern poetry is
pretty horrific, but come on—it’s not slavery.

I
admit, my first thought after reading the letter was of how much I’d like to
slap the shit out of this loser. Then I settled for a good laugh at how
pathetic he is. But then I got to thinking. And while I was thinking I was
halfheartedly scrolling through my Facebook feed. Apparently, some dude named
Bruce Jenner very publicly decided to become Caitlyn Jenner. And all Jon Stewart,
a guy I admire, could think to joke about with regard to the story was how
sexist the coverage was. Then there’s this Rachel Dolezal character, who was
head of an NAACP chapter in Spokane Washington—until her parents revealed that
she’s not even a little black (though I guess we can assume she’s still a
woman). The consensus seems to be that it’s cool to switch genders, but not cool
to switch races. I honestly can’t make myself care enough to learn what the
reasoning behind this distinction might be—though I am a big fan of that
awesome ice cream swirl braid. And of course there's already a controversy about just how sexist Jurassic World is. This was as predictable as the plot of a Hollywood blockbuster; every majorly successful movie and every majorly successful book gets accused of being sexist sooner or later. I defy you to find one that isn't. (Chris Pratt, well aware of the inevitability of this type of controversy, actually wrote a preemptive apology on Facebook.)

As
I was watching the bespectacled and mustachioed Jake Johnson in Jurassic World play with the toy dinosaurs
lining his computerized workstation, recounting the story of how he purchased
his vintage Jurassic Park t-shirt on e-Bay,
it occurred to me: these pseudo-dudes are a product of all the insanity surrounding
issues of racial and gender identity suffusing social media (where it has
trickled in from college campuses). The hipsters present themselves as these
parodies of manhood because they’ve been made to feel ashamed of their status
as male. They bury their opinions and predilections layers deep in the cheapest
irony because they’re insecure about being tourists in the regions and cultures
they’ve stolen from other people. And, damn, it’s no wonder they’re nostalgic
for the simpler, more innocent days when dudes could watch Star Wars without wondering if the boner they get from Carrie Fisher in
a slave bikini is proof of an inherently oppressive nature.

(TRIGGER WARNING: The following paragraph contains empirically well-substantiated conclusions that are nonetheless considered by identity activists to be thought crimes--er, um, I mean, microaggressions.)

Maybe
it’s just the circles I run in, but my email and Facebook feeds—not to mention
the magazines and news shows I watch—are lousy with click-baity bullshit toeing
the line of the most brain dead identity politics theories. Don’t get me wrong,
we as a society really do need to do a lot more about racial inequality. But
guilt tripping really nice geeky white dudes isn’t going to accomplish a damn
thing. And I understand that women really are systematically abused and oppressed
and discriminated against—in the fucking Middle East and parts of Africa and
Asia. I appreciate that all the Facebook feminists genuinely believe they’re
working to make the world a better place, but the facts they like to cite are
completely wrong, almost to a one. They scream about how women
are paid less than men, but they leave out the fact that it’s because women
make different
career and lifestyle choices—and that they make those same
choices cross-culturally. The Twitter activists vent their outrage about
how many college girls are assaulted, but they studiously cover up the fact
that the numbers they’re citing are based on surveys designed to produce
exaggerated incidence rates. Using similar methods, you can actually show that
just as
many men are raped in the U.S. as women. Clear evidence
of discrimination in science and technology fields, where so many hipsters
dwell, dried up over a decade ago. And yet the activists have only grown more
insistent, more outraged, and more numerous.

I
sat in the movie theater watching the scene where Johnson’s character gets
rebuffed when he goes in for a kiss with his geeky coworker, and I wondered
what it would be like to be a young man or young woman today, working out your
ideas about who you are and what role you might play in the world, forming your
identity, amid this never-ending caravan of Quixotes tilting at their
postmodern windmills. Race doesn’t really exist, we read again and again.
Really? Then why is it so fucked up that Rachel Dolezal has decided to be
black? But the more important question is, why do we think it makes you racist
to believe that race actually does exist? Can’t someone who believes in race
also believe that everyone should enjoy the same rights and freedoms regardless
of it? And can’t someone who accepts the evidence that biology plays a large role in gender hold that same view of the universality of rights and freedoms
without being sexist?

It’s
easy for me to wade through all the identity activists’ bullshit, because I
think it’s all bullshit. If we want to remedy racial inequality
in America, we’re going to have to do a lot more than address those implicit
biases people are always talking about. It’s going to take reforms to our economy and education systems. (Those biases, incidentally, tend
to be based
on social reality, rather than social reality being based on them.) And though I know
the case for sexism in the western world is sketchy, I certainly don’t envy
young women, many of whom we can predict are going to have stereotypical
tastes and stereotypical desires, even though they’re being taught that
stereotypes are evil and anyone who reinforces them is complicit in all kinds
of horrific crimes. Let’s face it, for most women, hipsters just aren’t sexy. But
we have to ask, who do young people have that they can turn to for straight
answers these days? They can’t go to their teachers because their teachers are
probably drinking the same Kool-Aid as the activists. And they can’t go to
scientists because they keep hearing how scientists are all white male
oppressors.

So I decided to rein in my contempt for the
hipster character toward the end of the movie. After all, Chris Pratt’s
character is almost too perfectly manly a man—he’s a bit of a parody himself.
Instead of making fun of and brutalizing hipsters, we should start trying to
help these gender-confused race-shamed little cowards. The only reason they’re
trying so hard to be trendy dressers is because it distracts them from their perceived
role as natural oppressors. The only reason they look so ridiculous is because they
believe the only role they deserve at this point in history is the one of
providing comic relief. And though they may take their one-punch knockout
ironically, I’d be willing to bet they'll still go home and cry about it.

What
do you all say? Let’s do something useful on social media for a change and use it
to end hipster abuse. Join the movement! Write about all the other
stereotypical and discriminatory portrayals of hipsters in movies and
literature. Maybe we can even do some surveys to get some quasi-evidence of all the
tragic tribulations hipsters face in their daily lives. I mean, how horrible
must it be to let the activists neuter you only to discover that everyone just
hates you more afterward? Oh, and maybe boycott Jurassic World… nah, on second thought, go see Jurassic World. It’s a really fun movie.

3 comments:

I'm tired of identity politics and gender hysteria. I try to laugh at it - and I do laugh at it, because when it's not doing any harm it can be pretty funny - but some days I just can't help but despair. I was borderline apoplectic over the Tim Hunt debacle the other day. It stops being funny when a real person's life is ruined.

How far do you think this will go? Most days, I'm convinced that the pomo/hipster/SJW types are a vocal minority and public opinion is starting to turn against them. But sometimes this stuff seems to run so deep that I'm afraid the conservative doomsayers are right and that the radical left is going to ruin Western civilization. I'm generally optimistic about modernity and the future of human progress, but postmodernism makes me wonder.

Keep up the good work. I haven't had the chance to comment on your last few posts. Too much to say and not enough time to say it.

Hi Chad, My take is that identity politics is getting virulent because cable news and various websites have learned that a heated controversy reliably grabs people's attention. And we tend to make the grievous error of thinking if we're arguing for good causes we aren't doing any harm. It's a recipe for uncritical acceptance of Manichean, essentially tribal ideologies. It's no coincidence the popular sites focus on celebrities, sex, gender, race, and various activist causes. Those are natural sweet spots.

But there is some cause for optimism I think. Beginning with Jonathan Chait's New York Magazine piece, "Not a Very P.C. Thing to Say," a lot of people have been discussing it as a problem. How much traction they'll get is hard to predict.

Chait's article: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/01/not-a-very-pc-thing-to-say.htmlHere's another really good one by Edward Schlosser, with lots of other good links: http://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afraidAnd here's a discussion on the BBC's Moral Maze I listened to just yesterday: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05y0ql1And of course there's always Christina Hoff Sommers, whose Youtube channel should be a required subscription for anyone discussing gender in public: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ewU33EdNnM